Monday, October 20, 2014

How to Optimize Your Sentence Length in Academic Writing?

Academic writing conveys clear and accurate information, and to this
end, places a high premium on well-constructed, carefully thought-out
content. Alas! Many a time, these hallowed features lead academic
sentences to becoming lengthy and convoluted, making the text hard to
read. In this article, let’s look at some tips that will help you
maintain an appropriate length of your sentence so that you can
communicate your message or idea more effectively to the reader, which
otherwise is hard to achieve, in a lengthy sentence in which the readers
have to go through chains of words and ideas without a break or a pause
and so find it harder to process all the information and keep in mind
what the original message or overall objective was when they started
reading the sentence and where all this information is leading to!
Long and convoluted sentences affect comprehension and readability.
Period. Without careful crafting, they can be really hard to understand.
Then again, too short sentences make for choppy writing without flow
and cannot hold complex thoughts.
Is there a way to optimize sentence length? Fortunately, yes.Here are some tips:

1. Appropriate sentence length: Most readability
formulas use the number of words in a sentence to measure its
difficulty. Try to keep the average sentence length of your document
around 20–25 words. This is a good rule of thumb to convey your meaning
in a balanced way and avoiding marathon or choppy sentences. The number
varies as per the field, audience, or the nature of writing. For
example, the average sentence length in abstracts of the natural
sciences is reported to be shorter than that found in social science and
humanities abstracts.

2. Vary your sentence length: Do not follow a
strict length for each and every sentence. Your writing should have a
mix of short, medium, and long sentences. The above tip suggests an
average for a long sentence. Incorporating variety in academic writing
avoids monotony, creates emphasis where needed, and helps the reader
understand connections between different points. If you find that your
sentence is as long as a paragraph or around 40–50 words, break it down
to smaller sentences. Similarly, if your text has many back-to-back
short sentences, join them.

3. Focus on your message: Do not cram two or three
main ideas into one long sentence. Know your main points and present
them with pauses by breaking them down into smaller sentences. Losing
focus of your message will lead to long drawn-out sentences and
disjointed writing. When conveying a series of facts, do not
unnecessarily connect all facts in one sentence but split them into
smaller sentences.

4. Fixing short sentences: Combining sentences
into a longer one is a simple way of fixing short and choppy sentences.
Use coordinating conjunctions (or, and, nor, but, or, yet, so) to avoid
strings of short, vaguely related sentences. Subordinating conjunctions
(after, since, whereas, because, etc.) are also used to connect
sentences as well as ideas effectively.

5. Fixing long sentences: Following the reverse of
the above tip, remove excessive coordinating conjunctions and instead
use a full stop to start a fresh sentence. Avoid starting a sentence
with qualifiers such as “although,” “because,” or “since.” Avoid
comma-plagued sentences and adding information in one long sentence
using commas.

6. Use concise expressions: Writing concisely and
avoiding redundancy play a huge role in securing your text from marathon
sentences. You could avoid beginning sentences with there/it is, reduce
wordy phrases and nonessential prepositional phrases, and use the
active voice.